Not so black and white

In 1958, an Australian Aboriginal was sentenced to die for murdering a child. But his life was spared thanks to the Adelaide News and its owner - Rupert Murdoch. Now the case has been made into a movie. David Fickling meets the man at its heart

Alice Springs is a small place, and everybody in town knows Max Stuart. Staff in bars and restaurants can point him out instantly. Everyone, it seems, knows his story. He is a respected elder of the Arrernte Aboriginal people, and his land includes the dramatic gorge at Watarrka, better known as King's Canyon. But in 1959 he was sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl near the South Australian town of Ceduna.

Mary Hattam's body was found in a cave on the beach at Thevenard on the Saturday before Christmas, 1958. Two days later, Stuart, an itinerant worker visiting the town with a funfair, was arrested and charged with murder. The subsequent case, appeals and claims of a police setup divided Australia and attracted worldwide attention. For champions of civil rights, Stuart's conviction exemplified the way Aboriginal people were mistreated by the white authorities. Four books and a documentary have examined the case, and there is a new film on release, Black and White, starring Robert Carlyle and Charles Dance.

We meet in the bar of the only casino in Alice Springs. Stuart says he gave up alcohol for good two years ago, and drinks cola as we talk; his only apparent vices now are cigarettes and the fruit machines.

It is sheer chance that he is in Alice at the moment. He keeps a caravan in town but spends much of the year on walkabout in the outback; his mail is sent to a niece who lives here, or to his former employers at the Central Land Council. The director and producer of Black and White once waited for three days in Alice for him to return from the bush for a meeting.

He is 77 and his white hair and beard are tinged with blonde under a black stockman's hat. Sinking cheeks press against the lenses of his tinted bifocals, and his worker's hands are bent with arthritis but he still stands tall and walks with a sturdy amble.

There is a slight lisp caused by some missing teeth - as a teenager he was a bare-knuckle boxer - and at times it is still hard to follow what he is saying. English is a second language, studied during his 14 years in jail: when he speaks in his native Arrernte, rich in complex hand gestures, he is immediately much more vigorously expressive and fluent.

Speaking to him underlines the implausible wording of the confession he supposedly dictated after prompting from Ceduna police, just before midnight on December 22, 1958. "I came to Ceduna ... as an employee of the Fun Land Carnival, a travelling show owned by Norman Keasman," it began. The show, the confession went on to explain, "was situated at the Ceduna Oval (sports ground)".

Richard Jones, one of the six police present at the two-hour interrogation, told the jury that the statement was taken down, barring a couple of pauses, "exactly as he said it". Stuart's lawyer, JD O'Sullivan, argued that it had been beaten out of him and concocted to suit the police case. Without the confession, the police had only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence linking Stuart to the crime. It even helped to clear up some difficult anomalies. The walls and roof of the cave where the child was killed were covered in blood, but there were no stains on Stuart's clothes or body.

The confession explained that after knocking the child unconscious in a lustful rage, he carefully removed his clothes and stored them out of the way before raping her. Having killed her, still blind drunk from the flagons of wine he had been drinking since early in the morning, he supposedly washed in a rockpool before getting dressed. The pathologist was adamant that the little girl had been fatally bashed with the rock before the rape. Yet Stuart's confession said it was after the rape.

Such inconsistencies did not trouble the judge and jury, and Stuart was sentenced to death four months later. One of the detectives, Alexander Phin, said a year after the trial: "I did not for a moment consider that outrage the work of a white man. I immediately thought it was the work of a darky." A drunk Aborigine, he said, was "an untamed animal".

The appeal courts were equally untroubled by the holes in the police case, and it took a two-month campaign by the Adelaide News to force a royal commission inquiry into the case and persuade the conservative South Australian government to commute Stuart's sentence to life imprisonment.

The role of the newspaper's 28-year-old proprietor of the day, Rupert Murdoch, has been hotly debated. Black and White portrays him working alongside his journalists in the white heat of the newsroom. The picture is disputed by many who worked on the paper. "As a representation of what went on, it was a mile off the beam," says David Bowman, one of the reporters on the case. "Rupert was never seen in the reporters' room or, if so, very rarely."

Stuart sees things differently. "I owe my life to Rupert Murdoch," he says. "He had hope to get me out, and I had hope to keep myself alive. I wouldn't be sitting here talking if it wasn't for Rupert Murdoch."

Murdoch sees the case as proof of his journalistic integrity, and wrote to the Central Land Council a few years back to ask after the man he defended; Stuart asks me to pass on his good wishes to Murdoch when I return to Sydney.

Almost as remarkable as the campaign to save him from the noose has been Stuart's emergence since his release in 1973 as one of the most influential Aboriginal elders in Australia. As chairman of the Central Land Council in Alice Springs, he has been an important spokesman for reconciliation and indigenous land rights.

His body language changes dramatically when he talks about what happened: "I been drinking me head off, and I walked - I don't know how - I walked back (to Ceduna). And a couple of days after, I got charged with murder and rape." He avoids eye contact, becomes more guarded and eventually says that he doesn't want to talk about the affair.

It is hard to know what to make of this. Ken Inglis, the most important historian of the case and one of Stuart's early champions, is not entirely convinced of his innocence. Nor is Black and White's screenwriter Louis Nowra, who interviewed one of the interrogating officers on his deathbed: Detective-Sergeant Paul Turner admitted the police had beaten Stuart, but he claimed it was only after the fairground worker had made a "chilling" confession of guilt.

For Inglis and for the Arrernte people, his guilt or innocence is now irrelevant; more important is the way someone so estranged from his traditional culture has reclaimed his heritage and become a respected leader. In this personal journey, many see hope for a similar renaissance of Aboriginal culture.

"I want to see my kids don't follow in my footsteps. Some people don't want to hear the (ceremonial) stories, but to look after themselves, they got to look at themself." He shakes his head, glancing aside at the bleeping mass of fruit machines. "Don't want them to be like me," he says. "What I was."